Burundi Rugembe Hill
Burundi Rugembe Hill
Both our supplies of washed Rwanda and Burundi have arrived late. Somehow, Burundi has overtaken Rwanda in the race and the crop isn’t huge but what we have is vibrant and behaving like it is very fresh from harvest. If you are brave enough to listen to the news, you will be pleasantly surprised that these costs haven’t increased to us or you somehow. Today we have roasted about 1/4 of this lot and it is just a beautiful single-origin coffee.
Top Trumps
Coffee Washing Station (CWS): Rugembe Hill
Country: Burundi
Region: Bujumbura; Mutamba County
Farm size: many small producers
Altitude: 1700 Meters above sea level.
Varietal: Red Bourbon
Process: Fully washed
Roast: Medium-developed filter.
Cup Potential: 🥣
|Aromatics: Candied Lime Peel⚡⚡| Body: Light as tea| Acidity Oxford (lime) marmalade|
Waffle:
I am really excited to bring you this coffee as we have looked at the profiling with a “different” set of eyes. In the lightest roasts of this coffee, Rugembe Hill was more like PLJ (Pure Lime Juice) than coffee and although it made me smile the way one does before necking a shot, I felt it may please only me and a very niche audience, even for us. Through developing the roast some more we managed to sweeten the acidity and put it in front of a few visitors who don’t usually drink black coffee. They got it and then I knew we were close.
Flavour:
On opening, Rugemnbe Hill is super sweet and limey. Due to the level of development, there is (what I refer to as) dark chocolate oil and then white sugar sweetness. On cooling, there is some soft stonefruit acidity, followed by a dark chocolate/ cocoa and lime finish.
This is just easy drinking and delicious filter coffee.
Recipe:
In filter, we are brewing this at 60-65g per litre.
Espresso Recipe:
Now the coffee is rested (some 5 days from roast) Rugembe Hill is tasting great all of the way up to 9oz in milk. In the largest cup, it is admittedly all of the lactic sugars you can wave a stick at, however as the cup sizes shrink the flavour strengthens. Limey chocolatey flatwhites and complex, juicy limey espresso. We have been brewing 17g of coffee into 34g (ish) for milk-based drinks in the late twenty seconds (26+) and another 10g of liquid and 5 seconds for espresso, taking your extraction into the early thirties.
Farm Stuff
Omwani works in partnership with the Migoti coffee company. Buying direct from smallholder farmers in the mountainous villages overlooking Lake Tanganyika. This includes Rugembe Hill, Murambi, Masenga, and Migoti villages. Both parties have long-term goals in helping producers with future crops and infrastructure. This includes projects like hydroelectricity and the development of alternative cash crops, as opposed to the kind of project that builds roads for the purpose of extracting minerals.
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